Lee looks to the analytic of diaspora (based on assumptions of a common origin) as a challenge to the previously more dominant lens of immigration with the U.S. as a common destination for Asian immigrants. In looking to claim a diasporic history, however, Lee appropriates Stuart Hall and echoes Lowe’s claims of culture as a production in order to argue that histories and notions of a ‘homeland’ are narratives that are imagined and constructed in order to frame and understand current identity formations. Lee explores the historical relations between the U.S. and Korea that shape the phenomenon of Korean migration to the U.S., stating: “We are here because you were–and are still–there, economically, politically, culturally” (187). Therefore, the myth of pure desire and choice is dispelled. At the same time that we consider diaspora as a framework, due to complex and heterogeneous history of Korea, Lee points to the dangers of imagining a romanticized ‘homeland.’ Rather, “the contesting and the contested is home” (191). The author references Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s “Dictee” as a text that illustrates the means through which the sense of national history upon which personhood is claimed must always be negotiated.

In “Queering the Homeland,” Lee argues that non-normative sexualities could play a role in rearticulating history. Lee does not offer any specific strategy as the best one, but rather points to the possible benefits from this project of queering. These consequences include the “critique of exclusive ideas about cultural authenticity” (193) that posit queer sexualities as Western constructs. I interpret it this way: if we ‘queer’ notions of kinship that pose a common motherland nation, then we might examine history in another way. Lee also notes dangers in our task of queering the homeland, such as (1) setting a false dichotomy between diasporic and queer, which repeats imperialist narrative of White versus ‘Other’; (2) assuming queerness is inherently a critique and therefore not accounting for the reproduction of exclusionary operations; (3) queering homeland must not be done by glossing over historical contexts and particularities; (4) must not impose Western definitions of sexuality.

At the same time, we must remember that history consists of “modes of representation” (200) and is never fixed and knowable. In writing this history, we must account for our own subject positions and our methodologies. Furthermore, we must insist that this task of claiming a queer diasporic history be framed within the present. It must be used to understand our present and show that “We cannot depend solely on histories to justify our existence. Queer and diasporic, wherever we are and whoever we fuck, the truth is that we always completely belong” (204).